Sunshine Law 101: The Sunshine Blog has been sitting in on a lot of public board and commission meetings lately and can testify that some are more painful than others primarily due to an increasing flood of disruptive testifiers or people who bring their personal gripes to a public forum.

Anyone who has tried to watch the Hawaiʻi Elections Commission lately might think this recent guidance from the Office of Information Practices was aimed squarely at that group. But other boards also have been struggling lately with how to balance allowing public testifiers to have their say with the sanity of volunteer board members. The Honolulu Charter Commission, for instance, recently spent nearly an hour arguing over how long each testifier should be allowed to speak (1, 2 or 3 minutes) with some members fearing a 3-minute limit would mean they’d never see their families again.

“OIP has received several inquiries from boards asking about various aspects of the Sunshine Law’s testimony requirements and how to manage testimony while still providing the public with the ability to attend and participate in meetings,” OIP said in a recent newsletter.

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The state agency put out this guidance to help address confusion on our public boards. The Blog thinks it’s well worth reprinting:

Opportunity to Provide Oral and Written Testimony

• Boards are required to give the public the opportunity to present written and oral testimony on all agenda items, including executive agenda items.  
• Boards are not required to allow testimony on matters outside the scope of the meeting agenda, and boards may decline to accept testimony regarding matters not on the agenda. 
• How an agenda item is framed will determine the breadth of testimony boards must accept, as well as the board’s own discussion and deliberation of that item. A broadly framed description of an issue could allow the board to discuss the issue broadly, but would also require the board to allow testimony on an equally broad range of aspects of the issue. 
• Boards cannot require testifiers to identify themselves. Individuals may testify anonymously.
• Boards cannot require preregistration for oral testimony, although they may request it and hear first from those testifiers who have previously registered.
• Boards may request that written testimony be submitted by a certain date, but cannot set deadlines for receipt of written testimony. However, members of the public who submit written testimony close to or after the start of the meeting run the risk that the members will not receive it in time to consider it.
• For remote meetings, boards must allow remote testifiers to be on camera if they so request.
• Boards are not required to read written testimony out loud to those in attendance.
• Boards cannot limit testimony to the start of a meeting, and must accept testimony before the board’s deliberation and decision-making on an agenda item.
• Boards can set reasonable testimony time limits by rule.

Testimony Submitted at a Meeting Is a Public Record

• Testimony submitted to a board becomes a government record subject to Hawai‘i’s open records law, the Uniform Information Practices Act (Modified), chapter 92F, HRS. The UIPA , which is also administered by OIP, governs public access to Hawai‘i state and county government agency records. The UIPA presumes that all government records are public unless an exception applies.
• Board meetings are open to the public, and anyone in attendance will be able to hear oral testimony. As such, there is no basis for boards to withhold public access to written testimony that was read at a public meeting.
• Boards sometimes receive written testimony that is not read aloud by the testifier at a public meeting. These written testimonies are also generally public because they were written for a public forum.
• Individuals who provide written or oral testimony to boards and disclose their own personal information in their own testimony waive any privacy interests they might otherwise have in that information. Boards need not redact such information prior to disclosing public testimony.
• However, when testimony implicates the personal privacy interests of someone other than the testifier, the board should consider the personal privacy interests of the third-party individual in determining whether or not to disclose information contained in written testimony that is about that third party.
• Information about third parties that may be redacted from testimony can include personal information like home address and telephone number, social security number, medical and financial information, and other types of information carrying privacy interests.
• Unfortunately, written testimony containing libel or false information about a third party is received by boards from time to time. Boards cannot prevent individuals from submitting false information, or from taking false information and further disclosing it, but the board itself is not required to further disclose such information in written testimony.  
• The UIPA provides immunity from civil or criminal liability for anyone participating in good faith in the disclosure or nondisclosure of a government records.

Disruptive Individuals

• The Sunshine Law allows a board to remove any person who wilfully disrupts a meeting. 
• For remote meetings held under section 92-3.7, HRS, boards are allowed to remove or block any person who wilfully disrupts or compromises the conduct of a meeting. 
• The Sunshine Law does not allow a board to pre-emptively bar a member of the public from attending a meeting in-person.
• If someone is engaging in threatening or dangerous behavior, it would be appropriate to have security present as a general precaution and to ask for police intervention when necessary.  Boards should consult with their attorneys as to whether additional measures may be taken, such as obtaining a restraining order against an individual from the circuit court.

Weapons of choice: Hawaiʻi got an A in the most recent scorecard from the national gun control organization, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The state is known for its strong gun laws and the law center was even happier that the Legislature earlier this year enacted a safe storage law. Studies have shown states with stronger gun laws have lower gun death rates.

“Commonsense gun laws stop crime and save lives, and Hawai‘i is proof of just how effective they can be,” Emma Brown, executive director at Giffords said in a press release.

Still, the law center thinks Hawaiʻi can do better. We just need to ban assault weapons, invest in community violence prevention programs and strength regulations on gun dealers, the report says.

That’s easier said than done, of course. Especially with the U.S. Supreme Court siding with gun rights activists that have challenged a key Hawaiʻi law that prohibits carrying guns in certain places. The nation’s highest court is set to hear another case in the next year that reviews Hawaiʻi’s ban on guns on private property, including businesses, unless the owner specifically allows them.

Here’s how Hawaiʻi stacks up against other states, according to the Giffords’ scorecard:

The name game: The Big Island, whose official name is the Island of Hawaiʻi, is getting a name change to … Hawaiʻi.

KHON News reports that the Hawai‘i Board on Geographic Names voted last week to change the island’s official name, apparently to bring it in line with other islands that have just a single name.

The board first proposed changing the name in 2024 and has been taking public input about it since. Many commenters over the past 18 months argued that it wasn’t worth the change — not only would it be expensive to change official documents and maps but people were just going to call it Hawaiʻi island or Big Island anyway.

But the board said it wanted to be culturally respectful and consistent, KHON reported.

Hawai‘i County Mayor Kimo Alameda told KHON he had no problem with the change.

“I know it always has, historically, been kind of named after Hawai‘i Loa the Navigator. So, Hawai‘i makes sense,” he said. “It could be confusing, because the state of Hawai‘i. But hey, I’ll take it. I mean, Hawai‘i, that sounds good to me.”